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EYE-TRACE SIGNATURES OF CLINICAL POPULATIONS
UNDER NATURAL VIEWING
by
Po-He Tseng
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPUTER SCIENCE)
December 2012
Copyright 2012 Po-He Tseng

A significant problem in clinical diagnosis of certain neurobehavioral disorders is the overlap in observed behavioral deficits, which extensively complicates diagnosis by requiring additional neuropsychometric testing. The thesis proposes and validates a novel method to reliably differentiate normal controls from patients with neurobehavioral attention deficits (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, and Parkinson's disease). This method alleviates the need for complex task instructions and instead quantifies how these populations (both patients and controls) deploy their overt attention differently while they freely view natural scene videos. We used a computational model of visual salience to analyze the videos, and the correlations between salience and participants eye movements were computed. Then these correlations as well as saccade statistics and inter-observer similarities were fed into classifiers, which not only reliably differentiated these populations but also identified the most discriminative features. This proposed method can be used easily with populations less able to follow structured tasks, and the low-cost and high-throughput nature of the method makes it viable as an unique new quantitative screening tool for clinical disorders. Moreover, the most discriminative features discovered by the method also provide insights on the effects of disorders on several aspects of attention and gaze control. We believe that this report is the first one to show that there is a latent signature of the disease that affects everyday behavior and is detectable by our algorithms. In addition, this signature is expressed in terms of the basic features of early attentional processing, which we believe based on our previous work will interest a broad community of neuroscience, psychology and computational researchers.

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EYE-TRACE SIGNATURES OF CLINICAL POPULATIONS
UNDER NATURAL VIEWING
by
Po-He Tseng
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPUTER SCIENCE)
December 2012
Copyright 2012 Po-He Tseng